It’s 2012!

So here we are, in 2012. Personal computers have been with us for about 35 years, the Internet even longer. AOL and the world-wide web brought the Internet to the masses 20 years ago. Everything is in the cloud now, available to us wherever there’s even a feeble cellular connection.

Where is our great information management system?

Mind maps are great. The software to create them, not so much. iThoughts for iPhone and iPad is pretty sweet, admittedly.

Evernote is a very useful tool for making sure your notes are available wherever you are, but the client software leaves much to be desired, and good luck finding a way to integrate Evernote well with any mind mapping solution.

Whiteboarding! We have iPads now, the magical tablet device that we’ve been waiting for since Star Trek, and there are (apparently) no good shared whiteboard solutions.

Don’t get me wrong: consumer software is in many ways better today than it’s ever been. Mobile devices have reinvigorated an industry that had grown rather stale, and we can only hope that breath of fresh air extends its way into the enterprise, where“good” software means it doesn’t crash every few minutes;“friendly” software is an oxymoron.

I have no solutions, no ideas for solutions, and maybe each of us would have too many different ideas for how to interact with a great knowledge manager for there to ever be just one such tool…but shouldn’t we have at least one by now?